Participating artists:
Bianca Bondi, Julian Charrière, Amalie Jakobsen, Regina de Miguel, Agnieszka Polska, Lisa Rave, Oliver Ressler, Miriam Sentler, Sam Smith

Curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk

CLIMATE OF CONCERN is the second exhibition of the Underland year program, examining the current over-indebtedness to the fossil fuel industry and mineral extractivism through the work of nine artists.

In 1991, the petrochemical business group Shell released the documentary Climate of Concern, which displayed the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change: increasing drought, extreme weather, floods, crop failures, disappearing islands, and migration. Nevertheless, Shell, alongside other companies such as Exxon and BP, deliberately hid internal reports carried out in the nineteen-eighties that predicted the catastrophic planetary consequences of the increasing emission of carbon dioxide released by fossil fuels extraction. Still to this day, Shell continues to do business as usual by profiting from fossil fuel extraction, actively contributing to climate change. Coal, petroleum, and natural gas have become an inseparable part of all aspects of industrial and energy production, and a substantial part of the technological ‘progress’ in history has been possible through the extraction of such resources. As a consequence, we have become intertwined with fossil memory so much so that there is no single aspect in our lives that is not somehow impacted by the (ab)use of fossil fuels. Everywhere we look there is a manifestation of what philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has called ‘fossil expressionism’: from the buildings we inhabit, the pavement they stand on, and the cars that pass them by, to the clothes we wear or the wrapping of our food; traces of fossil fuels are part of our daily landscape, identity, and existence

Radius – Center for Contemporary Art and Ecology
Kalverbos 20
2611 XW Delft
The Netherlands

www.radius-cca.org